Finding ways to accelerate the development of new pharmaceuticals is a worthy goal, but delegating the task to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a bad idea (Nature 471, 135; 2011). Change is needed at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), not the NIH.

The NIH has long excelled at funding and conducting basic research, but it should leave the development of commercial products to the private sector. Expenditures on commercial enterprises are likely to reduce the funding available for basic research.

Government bureaucrats are rarely leaders of technological innovation. They are not qualified to act as venture capitalists in choosing the most promising and deserving commercial product to fund and develop.

NIH director Francis Collins is right to be frustrated at how many basic science discoveries with therapeutic potential are waiting for follow-up by the pharmaceutical industry (G. Harris, The New York Times, 22 January 2011). But his colleagues at the FDA bear much of the responsibility for drug companies' reluctance or inability to take these forward.

Drug approvals have been dismal at a time when drug development should have been spurred by spending and new technologies. Expenditure on research and development by US-based drug companies almost quadrupled to more than US$65 billion between 1995 and 2009.

Fred Hassan, former chief executive of drug company Schering-Plough, asked “What will it take to get new drugs approved? The point is, we don't know.” Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, blamed the FDA's 'obstructionist' culture for its reputation as “an agency that is supposed to keep unsafe drugs off the market, not to speed access to lifesaving drugs” (The Wall Street Journal, 30 June 2008).